The Heartbleed bug is obviously a major challenge for financial institutions, but bank websites handle a variety of tasks. [...]

I would think what with the billions in bail out money that the banking cartel has taken from taxpayers that it would use some of its money to hire competent I.T. departments instead of applying another layer of million dollar bonuses to executive officers.

I highly recommend reading Poul-Henning Kamp's article, "A Generation Lost in the Bazaar," http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257#content-comments and its full comments (http://queue.acm.org/fullcomments.cfm?id=2349257). My comment, restated, is that a "quality improvement institute, factory and service" might help.

Open source is well established now in industry, and the problems are apparent to all. However, the benefits are seen as even greater. This creates an opportunity to improve existing open source software and future development and maintenance processes. (Not surprisingly, this same opportunity exists for closed source software.) Therefore, there should be a willingness on the part of government and industry to fund quality improvement. (I don't attempt to specify whether such organization(s) are for-profit or not-for-profit, but their products would need to be open for use without compensation for them to benefit open source developers.)

There are several approaches that should be pursued: (1) Improved training and education for developers; (2) Identification and promulgation of better or best practices (in choices of languages, tools and development processes); (3) Identification of existing software most in need of remediation or replacement; (4) Funding remediation/replacement of the most important needs; (5) Outreach to existing projects with offers to help adopt better practices; (6) Outreach to academia to encourage training in better practices; (7) Advice for starting new projects following best practices appropriate for the project size; (8) Funding development of tools to support better or best practices. (9) Review of existing tools and offering constructive suggestions for improvement, perhaps with funding.

I agree that "Patches are just band-aids ", and I think that we need to take real proactive steps.

We know that the vulnerable technology has been in place on up to two-thirds of all websites for approximately two years, the damage may already be done, and organization that uses OpenSSL rushes to fix the vulnerability before hackers can steal more data.

So what can we do to try to prevent the data theft?

Waiting for better software or protocols isn't really an option. While new software will inevitably come along, there are limited guarantees, especially in the case of open-source technology such as OpenSSL, that it will be bug-free. In fact, we should expect that they will be breached.

The most viable option is proactive security of the data itself. By tokenizing or encrypting sensitive data at the point of creation or acquisition, it can be made useless to potential thieves, even in memory.

There's no perfect answer to fix years of exposure, but moving forward, adopting the most proven, vendor-backed data security solutions that protect the data itself can offer significantly reduced risk over protocols alone.

This raises a good question for readers: does your organization have a good catalog of the commercial and open source software deployed on websites and systems that could be subject to attack? How quickly could you track down where a software module with a newly discovered vulnerability was installed and figure out what to do about it?

To learn more about what organizations are doing to tackle attacks and threats we surveyed a group of 300 IT and infosec professionals to find out what their biggest IT security challenges are and what they're doing to defend against today's threats. Download the report to see what they're saying.

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